Friday 9 October 2009

James Delingpole is a twat

Probably not one of my cleverest blog titles, if I'm being honest, but he really is a massive twat. He's the sort of twat that would probably love finding out that people like me think he's a twat, as he sits there oozing twattery from his twatty face.

You can pretty much pick any entry from his Telegraph blog to back this up, but let's start with the most recent one. After the headline How pathetically useless of Cambridge Union to ban Michael Savage, Delingpole runs his mouth off about Cambridge Union apparently cancelling an invitation for Savage (an even bigger twat than Delingpole) to speak in one of their debates at the last minute. After a swift kick at Islam and a suggestion that the Union wimped out, Delingpole is forced to add a sheepish update at the end, after he gets an email from the Union explaining that they actually just couldn't afford to meet Savage's technical demands. While it's nice to see Delingpole admit he was wrong, the headline does still call them 'pathetically useless'.

Skipping past a few entries, including a nauseating one where he taunts his wife about how much he wants to fuck Carla Bruni, we come to the following bizarre entry from Sunday: A little light Islamist propaganda to liven up your Sunday. I'll quote it in its entirety:

I’ve just been supervising my nine-year old daughter’s home work for the week. She attends a Church of England Primary School. Here is the text she was set:

“Abdul left his friend’s house. He had had a fun afternoon. He took the route home. He was whistling softly. He scuffed his feet in the dry leaves. He pretended to dribble a football up the pitch. He passed a derelict church.”

Is it just me or is there something seriously wrong with the subliminal messages being sent out here?
Because, as we all know, C of E schools are the first place I go to for my Islamic propaganda. As far as I can make out, Delingpole makes the case that this is a sneaky leftist conspiracy to foist Allah on us all merely by noting that this fictional kid is named Abdul. That's basically it, plus the 'derelict church' bit, which inflamed a few of his commenters (although one could just as easily argue that the image of a Muslim walking past a derelict C of E church was subtly anti-Islamic, you could certainly imagine it as a shocking vignette in a BNP party political broadcast). So I Googled the first line and found this PDF link to what would appear to be that piece of homework. In that link, the text is exactly the same, but it says 'old church' instead of 'derelict'. It could be that this is a standard piece of homework that Delingpole's kid's school changed for some reason, or it could be that Delingpole got a bit creative there, I don't know. In any case, it goes on:

He heard a sound. He stopped. He listened. He heard someone crying. He pushed the gate open. He was scared. It creaked. He shivered. He looked around. He wondered whether there was anyone behind him. He went through the gate.
...so it's not really about Abdul or the church, it's a starting point for kids to write a story. Even if it were, is naming the character in your fictional story 'Abdul' likely to cause of wave of little Church Of England school kids to start strapping bombs to their chests and joining the jihad? Not least since the other questions on that page involve kids named Charlie and Gavin and fucking Joshua.

My recent personal favourite is where he claims, without irony, that liberals can't do comedy. No, really: 'Liberal satire' is an oxymoron. Adopting the moral high ground, as he often does, by calling liberals 'libtards', Delingpole takes aim at comedians like Al Franken and Jon Stewart (seemingly because Chris Hitchens already picked on them and he's merely cribbing off a Hitchens piece), asserting that they're not funny because they don't make jokes about Islam (except when, as some commenters point out, they do). Unable to think of any actual funny right-wingers (seriously, who is there? Fucking Clarkson?), Delingpole desperately tries to claim the Daily Mash as right-leaning satire (sample headline from this week; "TORIES TO RAISE MILDLY RACIST, CARAVAN-OWNING BASTARD AGE"), which will come as something of a surprise to many of us.

He does little to explain why right-wing comedy is funny and left-wing stuff isn't, but that's not really Delingpole's style; merely asserting that something is true is usually enough for him. He contrasts the Daily Mash with another, supposedly shit, liberal satire site which I haven't read. Strangely though, he neglects to contrast Stewart's wildy successful Daily Show, or the similarly popular Colbert Report, with the unbelievable failure of its conservative equivalent, Fox's quickly-aborted 1/2 Hour News Hour, which was thoroughly derided during its brief 17-episode lifespan and featured the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter struggling to make joking about the poor and minorities into something funny. (The show was swiftly cancelled and had a rating of 12 out of 100 on MetaCritic).

I could go on, but some of his other entries are making me lose the will to live. You've got Isn't Black History Month a bit racist?, which fails to add any particular insight beyond its depressingly familiar title, and things like How the global warming industry is based on one MASSIVE lie, one of his many pieces where he takes the word of a 'global warming sceptic' at face value and runs around smugly touting his triumph over the libtards. In this particular one he can be found repeating criticisms that have spread like wildfire throughout the right-wing blogosphere, in an article so shit it got a special mention in RealClimate's weary rebuttal.

Delingpole loves to pour scorn on the idea of anthropogenic climate change; most weeks you can find him hiding behind Ian Plimer, tossing insults at George Monbiot for following the scientific orthodoxy on climate change, because Delingpole read Plimer's largely discredited book and found it well impressive. His understanding of science is pretty laughable; in one hilariously bad piece of playground name-calling, he responds to Monbiot's perfectly reasonable suggestion that a debate between himself and Plimer take place in written form to allow readers to check out the sources rather than in a live public slanging match, by calling him a 'chicken' and characterising his response as
...the squirmy, weaselly get-out of a no-good, snivelling, yellow-bellied, milquetoast loser quite terrified of having the massive holes in his puny argument mercilessly exposed in public by a proper scientist who actually knows his subject inside out?
And that, my friends, is the sort of thing that justifies my admittedly childish title. I thought about taking the high road, but he's really just a big silly fartypants.

37 comments:

  1. If you appreciate the, ahem, qualities of Mr Delingpole, you really should spend a little time among the delights of Biased BBC where a whole platoon of wannabe-Delingpoles construct a vast conspiracy theory of a gay, Taliban-loving Communist clique who have taken over the BBC to destabilise our way of life.

    Worth a visit, too, to this guy who keeps up a running commentary on their wilder moments, though how he manages to spend quite so long in their company without psychiatric support, God knows.

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  2. I've always thought the word 'Delingpole' could go quite far just meaning 'thick twat'.

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  3. I'm guessing he'd be stunned at quite how many mainstream comedians are liberal atheists, then?

    Crikey, half the reason Ricky Gervais' latest Holywood film has rather flopped is that the yanks have actually notced that it's maybe a teensy bit critical of religion...

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  4. Totally in agreement with this blog.

    He says things the upper class would love to hear. This being because Delingpole is so far up the backsides of the upper class (as he so desperately aspires to be bracketed as such) he'll say or do anything to please the toffs. Check out his defence of them in the 'Class In Britain series from Channel 4 around 4 years ago.

    He clearly thrives on the attention, you could see him revelling in it when he was on TV discussing paternity/maternity knowing full well through that shit eating grin of his that he was getting a buzz (and attention) from blurting out the stupidest most against the grain comment he could conjure up.

    Basically any man who utters the words 'foxhunting teaches courage, self-discipline, courage and self-respect' needs to have the proverbials kicked out of him by a pack of foxes. And me. I hate James Delingpole.

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  5. I'm less shocked by the idea that the Daily Mash is right-wing than by the idea that it's an example of *good* satire. It's terrible.

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  6. Technically, it is leashes of foxes and packs of hounds. Nonetheless, Delingpole is a spoon

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  7. I Once gave Jamie a fat doobie at Xmas dinner. He went green and had to lie down for the rest of the day...

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  8. I could not agree more. To add to which, you write better than he can!

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  9. Well Delingdouche has done one thing fantastic as far as i'm concerned. I would never have seen your blog without first reading some bit of trash he had written. Frankly, you are a funny funny son of bitch.

    Cheers

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  10. He could make Peter Mandleson look good!

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  11. Brilliant. I'm just jealous that I didn't write this. Though, to my credit, I have always thought that Delingpole was a twat. That must count for something?

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  12. Nicely put. I spend half my life bashing Delingpole - http://siftingtheshit.blogspot.com/

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  13. Delingpole has been nominated for the Upper Class Twit of the Year Award by an Amazon reviewer. Worth a read at http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/1596985887/ref=cm_cr_dp_synop?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending#R2JEHNQGMIDDE0

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  14. It is truly gratifying that this wonderful rant appears first whenever someone searches Google for "Delingpole is a twat", which I'm guessing happens approximately five times every second. Cheers!

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  15. I'm a stuffy old tory and I've been a longstanding reader/subscriber of the Spectator which for some bewildering reason employs Delingpole. I detest his smug, crude, and egregiously unfunny articles. More seriously, his position on climate change is so decided and assertive that one wonders who funds him.

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  16. Delingpole showed his twat colours in spades on 'Any Questions' tonight (13/08/10). It wouldn't be so bad if he actually had some kind of intellectual basis for the twattery he spouts. Unfortunately, he doesn't! Just another minor columnist with ideas far aabove his intellect I'm afraid. Reminds me a bit of a right-wing version of A.A. Gill! Nothing he writes or says is worth wasting time on either.

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  17. I love those blogs because those are so interesting and you have to read a lot something that I like too much. Buy Viagra Generic Viagra

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  18. Just want to say The Daily Mash is so desperately unfunny. Simply stating the opposite of what's true doesn't make something funny.

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  19. Hmmm . . .

    Delingpole is a bit of a twat, but he's an honest twat who cheerfully and readily admits when he's been wrong.

    Monbiot, on the other hand, is a (in my personal opinion) conniving twat who has enmeshed himself in his own little web of self-justification, and just will not admit when he has been wrong - witness his moronic article claiming that heavy snowfall is a sign of global warming, five years after he predicted snow-free winters from now on thanks to global warming!

    Delingpole may be a twat. But Monbiot is the twat's twat.

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  20. Monbiot's position has never been that the weather in one particular part of the world, in one winter, needs to have any relation to ongoing climate trends. His quite consistent position has always been that there is lots of evidence for global warming independent of what the weather looks like outside my window right now.

    The point of the recent article, however, was to show that even on his opponents own terms, current conditions were consistent with global warming given that while it was cold in the UK, it was much hotter than average elsewhere.

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  21. Am I the only person to see how absolutely dire The Daily Mash is? I can't find dissent anywhere on the internet - people talk as if it's The Onion. Incredible.

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  22. Bit of an long-delayed echo here, but I only found this blog because I had foolishly been typing 'James Delingpole + wanker' into Google. Having seen some of his - ahem - output, I should have realised and gone straight to 'James Delingpole + twat'.
    Silly me.

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  23. Heh, you're not the only person to find this blog that way!

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  24. I have a certain amount of sympathy for your opinion although I wouldn't use the same terminology! I have suffered a few insults from his supporters myself, apparently I am a fascist and a bbc loving bolshevik!
    http://bit.ly/gnCU4i

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  25. Delingpole is positive proof than in the UK even mentally deficient retards can get a job writing for the Telegraph. Those that can't read his blog and believe every word.

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  26. Hear hear! I've never seen anyone write anything so obnoxious, self-righteous and smug as Delingpole does! He's is an utter waste of space.

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  27. i too arrived here looking for james delingpole twat. excellent post. whoever linked to the biased bbc website has just ruined my entire day.

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  28. Well I was in the same house at school with James Delingpole and all I can say in his defence is that he didn't try to bum us juniors like many of his peers did ( you know who you are).

    Well done James.

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  29. I got to this site by googling "james delingpole is a cunt".

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  30. You guys would love this savaging of Mr. Delingpole here:

    James Delingpole is a CUNT

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  31. The problem with pointing at twats is that everyone goes to see just how big a twat he is and his ratings go up.

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  32. Has anyone seen his recent 'review' of the Doctor Who Christmas Special? OK it isn't everyone's cup of tea, but the way Delingpole goes on (and on, and bloody on!) and the amount of crap he comes out with... If he hates the show so much why waste time on it? My thoughts when reading it were : 'For f*** sake, it's only a TV show!' and 'Does he actually get paid to write such drivel?!'

    His intro on the Torygraph website also shows his total twattery: Delingpole claims that 'He is right about everything'. Can you imagine living with the bastard?! You'd either top yourself or do time... What hope has British journalism got when spoonfed right-wing bellends like Delingpole infest the media?!

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  33. Oh yeah: That slimy Tory cockwipe, Delingpole has about as much chance of screwing Carla Bruni as I have of playing for Manchester United....

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  34. Real issue is he cannot take what he dishes out.
    insaid his career in journalism should end if he could not munch a bacon butty whilst clearing a 5ft hedge on his hack in full hunting attire without any fat staining his uniform.....not that I voted for Miliband, but politicians should lose for better reasons than bacon fat on the trousers.....

    Most right wing thug yobs start boohooing when you treat them as they treat others, rather in contradiction to The
    Ten Commandments they are all supposed to be obediently in awe of......

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  35. John Stewart is funny? Colbert is funny? These 2 shows are basically porn for progressives. They pump out propaganda to the faithful which is clearly intended to indoctrinate but hide behind the excuse that it is just comedy. It is quite sickening to watch them basking in the glow of their self-assumed virtue which they bolster by trashing people who don't think like them.Trevor Noah is even worse.

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